The hedgehog was cool, but I was distracted by the sidebar of a fox frozen solid in Norwegian ice.. that picture kept drawing my eyes and I ended up reading that article and then closing all related tabs with a shudder.

Dinsdale was one of the Piranha Brothers in a Monty Python sketch. They in turn were based on two ruthless gangsters, the Kray Twins. Dinsdale was based on the younger and more naive (but extra cruel) brother, who would put anything up his nose or in his body if he thought it might be a drug. He was paranoid, of course, from the effects of all those drugs or possible drugs.

The fictional Dinsdale says the transvestite prostitute played by John Cleeves, believed that he was pursued by giant hedgehog named Spiney Norman who like Godzilla could be any size from ten feet up.

The Kray Twins were some of the worst thugs in England but they hobnobbed with the rich, famous and aristocratic, with a special fondness for fashionable bohemians, boxers, and celebrities. The one represented by Dinsdale was gay. Imagine Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack socializing with guys who would literally nail your head to the floor or a coffee table (as the character played by Graham Chapman confesses they did to him in the skit. (I'm not saying that they didn't--murderers and mobsters were fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to socialites and people like Truman Capote.

Apparently the Kray Twins were pleased with the sketch that the Monty Python gang did, seeing as they were allowed to live to ripe old ages, except for Graham Chapman who was unhappily gay and committed suicide.

The sketch where two Italian type mobsters threaten an army base may also owe something to the Kray Twins.

A lot of the Monty Python foolery was quite topical so it helps to be old enough or well-read enough to understand the jokes and references. Consult Wikipedia. It knows all and tells all.

For the record, I'd like to point out that I was eight years old when the show first aired in Canada and didn't know all this stuff at the time. That was the perfect age range to watch the show because your parents and grandparents didn't get it and forbade you to watch it, so you got to watch it when you had a babysitter as one of the things you could trick a babysitter into allowing you to do.

My extensive knowledge of British culture in the 1950s and 1960s is largely acquired from old sitcoms, the Goon Show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and cartoons. Cartoons are the best way to learn history between 1800 and the present. They reference all the quirks and details of cultural and home life as well as the news and great historical events, so you get way more out of a book of newspaper cartoons than you would a shelf of thick historical tomes.

I'm just one of those people who knows what a whiffle-tree is and other things largely forgotten before I was born. Rumours that I am older than Count Dracula are started by me and perfectly untrue.

Dinsdale was one of the Piranha Brothers in a Monty Python sketch. They in turn were based on two ruthless gangsters, the Kray Twins. Dinsdale was based on the younger and more naive (but extra cruel) brother, who would put anything up his nose or in his body if he thought it might be a drug. He was paranoid, of course, from the effects of all those drugs or possible drugs.

The fictional Dinsdale says the transvestite prostitute played by John Cleeves, believed that he was pursued by giant hedgehog named Spiney Norman who like Godzilla could be any size from ten feet up.

The Kray Twins were some of the worst thugs in England but they hobnobbed with the rich, famous and aristocratic, with a special fondness for fashionable bohemians, boxers, and celebrities. The one represented by Dinsdale was gay. Imagine Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack socializing with guys who would literally nail your head to the floor or a coffee table (as the character played by Graham Chapman confesses they did to him in the skit. (I'm not saying that they didn't--murderers and mobsters were fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to socialites and people like Truman Capote.

Apparently the Kray Twins were pleased with the sketch that the Monty Python gang did, seeing as they were allowed to live to ripe old ages, except for Graham Chapman who was unhappily gay and committed suicide.

The sketch where two Italian type mobsters threaten an army base may also owe something to the Kray Twins.

A lot of the Monty Python foolery was quite topical so it helps to be old enough or well-read enough to understand the jokes and references. Consult Wikipedia. It knows all and tells all.

Thanks for that. I should have known who Dinsdale was as I used to watch MP all the time when it was running. *sigh*

brantgoose:Dinsdale was one of the Piranha Brothers in a Monty Python sketch. They in turn were based on two ruthless gangsters, the Kray Twins. Dinsdale was based on the younger and more naive (but extra cruel) brother, who would put anything up his nose or in his body if he thought it might be a drug. He was paranoid, of course, from the effects of all those drugs or possible drugs.